if all the world's a stage, where's the proscenium arch?
or, reacting to the stories of Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco
Apparently I am in my Ligotti era, because I can’t seem to get enough of the man’s work. After having read Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and also having read Grimscribe: His Lives & Works, I turned to Teatro Grottesco again. I’d read a handful of the stories in it before, but never really gave it my full attention. As I am a bit of a completist when it comes to someone’s work, I decided to renew my acquaintance with this collection, to see if perhaps there was something I’d missed.
Interestingly, and somewhat as I’d expected, Songs of a Dead Dreamer comes first in Ligotti’s bibliography, published in 1985 and then revised/expanded a few years later, in 1989. This collection felt to me very much like someone’s ‘early’ work, full of stories that had beautiful language and interesting themes but which often didn’t exactly land for me. Grimscribe, however, was published in 1991, and—to my thinking—reads far more assured, mature, and complex than the former.
I have yet to read Noctuary—the collection which comes before Teatro Grottesco—published in 1994, a few short years after Grimscribe. I am curious to see if the stories in Noctuary are even more honed, even more mature, than those in Grimscribe, but as that is a difficult collection to find in print, I have jumped ahead to 2006, when Teatro was published.
Much like the prior collections, Teatro Grottesco is divided into sections. Oddly, though, whereas both Songs and Grimscribe seemed to have a subterranean link and internal schematic for the naming of these sections, Teatro seems content to simply name them alliteratively, and there are only three of them, showing here:
DERANGEMENTS
DEFORMATIONS
THE DAMAGED and THE DISEASED
Not only do these titles seem to echo one another in terms of definition, but they also seem to repeat one another, to my mind—especially the third section. What else is a ‘derangement’ or a ‘deformation’ other than ‘damage’ or ‘disease’? This surface-level grouping was a bit of a disappointment for me, especially given the intense amount of thought I felt was given to the naming in the prior collections, though there are still some genuinely great stories—and writing!—in each.
The first of the three sections, DERANGEMENTS, includes five entries. I found this section to be the stronger of the triad, personally. The first of these, “Purity,” almost begins where Grimscribe’s penultimate section “The Voice of the Child” left off—it is from the perspective of a young narrator, Daniel, coming into contact with the bizarre and encoded world of the adult. Of course, since this is Ligotti, the adult is anything but well-adjusted or normal—in fact, this story attempts to convey that family is anything but safe. In a striking turn of events, Ligotti chooses this time to manifest his philosophical monologue through the mouthpiece of the father, addressed to a hapless student of a religious group (“Citizens for Faith”), which is overheard by Daniel.
This mouthpiece, the father, is engaged in a sort of psychological alchemy, and through a brief flashback, we learn that he has developed a certain apparatus which siphons, or drains, the ‘impurities’ out of one’s head. Daniel explains how he feels the attic of their house is haunted, but once he comes in contact with this apparatus, he is ‘relieved’ of his belief, shriven of it even, and this ‘impurity’ is made manifest, physically speaking, as an ectoplasmic goo kept in a jar. This, though, isn’t even the true stuff of the story—when Daniel explores the ‘worse’ neighborhood (in contrast to the ‘bad’ neighborhood in which his family currently resides), he meets a woman named Candy, who lives in an absolute shit-hole of a house (pun intended) and it is their interaction that provides a shockingly sweet and blisteringly human core to this story. There is, in fact, a kind of purity that lingers in the brief relationship between Daniel and Candy, even if it is a little deranged, even if it does involve murder.
The second story is one of my favorites, a bleak and often even humorous glance at civic administration: “The Town Manager,” which is a return to Ligotti’s penchant for parable. In an unnamed city that has echoes of Anytown, USA (a Main Street is mentioned) but that could not be situated anywhere other than the mazy boulevards of Ligotti’s imagination, there is a somewhat dubiously organized system of governance. Our narrator declaims that there has always been a town manager—even before the present one, there was one before, and one before that, and with each grinding shift of political assignation, the town changes too. Do not be mistaken—this is no democratic process. There is mention made of a town ‘charter,’ which specifies that when a town manager goes missing, the townspeople must do their due diligence in attempting to locate them—but even the narrator mentions that this could be some kind of sleight-of-hand to distract them from the installation of a new town manager.
When the search concludes, the narrator discovers that this is, in fact, the case—but this administrator, however, is nothing like their predecessors. Despite stating that “change was the very essence of our lives,” what happens next is such a radical departure from the normal flux-state of the citizenry that the motives of the new town manager are thrown into question. Of course, this being Ligotti, resistance is met with implacable force. Missives are left for the townspeople that are presented in capital letters, written in crude phonic spelling, as if the directives issued were originating from the cruel hand of a toddler-god. This, however, is only the beginning. The town undergoes a sudden and disturbing shift in character, as well as in form and dimension, a caricature of a carnival that highlights the desperate, hideous nature of both capitalism and tourism. When the end of the story comes, it almost feels a little bit too pat, to my mind, but I can’t think of a better conclusion myself. It is thematically appropriate, and even speaks to the nature of how power and authority (even when given freely) can derange the lives of everyone around it, like how a festering abscess might leach into other tissues and eventually corrupt the entire body politic.
Of course, the best kind of literary derangement occurs when it brings in meta-involvement, and “Sideshow, and Other Stories” is a delightful, multi-movement scherzo, placing Ligotti himself (or one of his puppet-narrators) in the driver’s seat. I need to spend a bit of time on this story, as it is one of my favorites of Ligotti’s for a multitude of reasons.
This story is told in smaller sections, and hilariously, opens with the subtitle of “Foreword.” It’s relatively rare for a work of short fiction to include a foreword, and this endeared me to “Sideshow” almost immediately. I’m also a sucker for metafiction in general, so it didn’t take very long for this story to sink its hooks into me. The recursive nature and demonstrably satirical tone concerning publishing/writing felt very much like the efforts of an author trying to reconcile themselves with the eternal battle between Art and Commerce. This war often involves questions of the soul, or lack thereof, and true to form, Ligotti launches into this with his customary salvo of bleak outlook, framing the act of writing itself as a kind of “show business.”
This “sideshow” takes the form of a bookended collection of stories, ostensibly written by a secondary character. Our protagonist opens this piece with the following statement:
“At the time I met the man who authored the stories that follow, I had reached a crisis point in my own work as a writer of fiction.”
Ligotti—or at least, his puppet-narrator—takes pains to mention that both the author and the writer are strikingly similar: they meet in a coffee shop, both suffering from insomnia, in the late hours of the night, both smoking the same brand of cigarettes and drinking decaf coffee. This is the not the first time Ligotti draws parallels between fictional characters—indeed, the concept of the doppelgänger is prevalent in many of his works (see: Frank & Frank, in his novella My Work is Not Yet Done), and it might be noted here that, classically speaking, to see one’s own double is a harbinger of incipient death. But Ligotti is less concerned with the shuffling off of one’s own mortal coil than he is with the ‘peculiar and ridiculous’ notion that absolutely anything has continuity and coherence. To Ligotti, the act of writing is not self-motivated; indeed, nothing in our lives is—there is an unnamed (perhaps unnameable?) external locus of control, prompting us to act as we do.
It is also worth noting that this gentleman author, when asked, mentions that his ‘center of interest’ or ‘focus’ in writing is autobiographical in nature—pointing to Ligotti’s disdain for anything that seems self-serving, or anything which assigns value to our own perceptions of the world. As our friend the author remarks, somewhat caustically, his ‘autobiographical wretchedness’ isn’t even ‘first-rate’ show business, it is merely a sideshow in the carnival of life. But, interestingly enough, this author also remarks that he is the ‘ringmaster’ of his own carnival, and thus is innately biased to think his own perception of things has more value than it truly does. Ligotti seems to be saying that once one becomes aware of this fact, the show-business façade falls down as easily as an unbolted Hollywood flat, revealing nothing but the emptiness of a blank stage behind.
Thus, “Sideshow, and Other Stories” moves into a five- (or, perhaps, six-?) story interlude, all of which are presented to the narrator via the conduit of a waitress, and all of which are generally less than two pages long. (Again, Ligotti’s fondness for the ‘parable’ is shown in these flash-length pieces.) It is remarked that the narrator never sees this ‘author gentleman’ again. As we move into the quintet (or sextet?) of stories, each one titled, and each one illustrating a particularly loathsome horror. In “I. The Malignant Matrix,” we are treated to a character described as a scientist and metaphysician who is brought to a place where hideous beings are seen and heard. By the end of the story, we are treated to Ligotti’s sneer of anti-natalism:
“But just as that door was closing behind me I realized how much those sounds I heard reminded me of the tiny voices of things which, however imperfect their form, have been newly thrust into the world of phenomenal existence.”
In “II. Premature Communication,” we return to the Voice of the Child, which depicts a brief but tragic tale of parental loss in the depths of winter. This story had the feeling of an urban legend, a quick flash of pre-cognitive portent, but didn’t seem to be linked to the others in the series, to my mind. This, however, is immediately followed by “III. The Astronomic Blur,” which tells of a ‘little store’ whose malignant presence infects the other houses around, seeming to imply a kind of ghastly, cosmic gentrification—even the narrator’s own house, which, by the end of this fragment, is abandoned. Following this, “IV. The Abyss of Organic Forms,” the narrator tells the story of his disabled half-brother’s obsession (and subsequent disappearance/transmogrification?) with horses. This installment also left me somewhat puzzled, as it did not seem to fit with the others, thematically speaking. Finally, “V. The Phenomenal Frenzy,” describes the narrator coming in contact with an unnerving house in a ‘backroad landscape’ so terrifying that it inspires panic and subsequent flight.
And yet, there is more to “Sideshow, and Other Stories.” An “Afterword” bookends this ‘collection’ of fragments—our insomniac narrator from the coffee shop returns to make musings and meta-fictional commentary on the manuscript he has been handed—indeed, there is a sixth story, left unfinished, ostensibly to be entitled “VI. Sideshow,” which directly references the meetings described in the “Foreword,” right down to the gentleman author’s own dialogue. Of course, this made me grin and feel a little giddy—nothing makes me happier than meta-commentary on the art of fiction-writing—but I could not help noticing that the fragments of numbered titles, nested Matryoshka-like within the main story, felt too loose and disconnected to be thematically relevant to the overarching narrative. Each installment was appropriately unnerving, to be sure, and yet I couldn’t help feeling as though each had been culled from a folder of half-finished stories, then jammed together with meta-fiction as their glue. Ligotti is a canny, intelligent writer, and so I remain unsure if that is the true genesis of this particular story, but as the “Afterword” concludes, we are treated to what may be a final appearance of the ‘gentleman author’ in a debris-strewn alley, reduced to a ‘shrunken creature’ that is only able to make a series of rasping sounds. Our narrator remarks then that they have triumphed over their crisis, and mentions how they can’t wait to return to their work.
There is something to be said for the supposed devolution of the gentleman author into a rasp-voiced homunculus; indeed, the very aim of the writer (generally speaking) is to communicate, and yet this writer has been reduced to something which can barely speak, let alone express themselves cogently. There is, I am sure, more to be gleaned from this fascinating, multi-layered story, but I have already spent far too much time in this particular tent, and so I will continue on lest I, too, fall victim to a derangement of my own.
And so, “The Clown Puppet,” which, as you might guess, returns to Ligotti’s favorite metaphors—two of them, in fact, within the same title. This story concerns the observations of someone who is prone to fits of—what they believe to be imaginary—visitations from a ‘clown puppet.’ Of course, because this is impossible, the narrator assigns to these visitations a ‘nonsensical’ value. But Horatio, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy—and so, since this besieged and beleaguered narrator cannot understand or comprehend the reasons for these “delusions,” he diagnoses himself as an epileptic. Indeed, even the onset of these visitations are described with a sort of ‘aura,’ like the incipience of a migraine. Once again, Ligotti delights in using colors to heighten the uncanniness of the event, this time with a ‘rich reddish-gold,’ which invokes the voluminous hue of none other than curtains on a theater’s stage.
However, by the sudden involvement of a second character during one of these visitations, the narrator realizes that there may be more to their delusions than simple psychological projection, and it is here that the story crosses over from dream to nightmare. Despite this epiphany, “The Clown Puppet” concludes where it began—with nonsense. The narrator lapses back to incomprehension, choosing to remain in relative ignorance rather than attempt to comprehend the fearful thing that has shown itself to him. As before, Ligotti emphasizes that the search for knowledge, or for any level of understanding, will only lead to more questions, and the endless search for answers (none forthcoming) will only lead to madness.
Finally, our last Derangement: “The Red Tower.” I was, at first, unmoved by this entry. It is ostensibly composed entirely of that most wretched of fiction-writing sins, “world-building,” and spends its length on describing the eponymous Red Tower at length, in great detail—then pulls it apart, brick by brick, and destabilizes the entire narrative by story’s end. On a second read, it became clear to me that this was a study in reverse engineering, and that Ligotti has designed a story based entirely around the schematic of negative space. Most curiously, though, the ‘stuff’ of this negative space appears to be commenting directly on the nature of Industry, but deracinates even that concept down to the act of creation itself—the Manichaean struggle of life and death.
Most of this story is communicated via rumor and hearsay, which makes the entire tale appear veiled in a foggy, unsure mist—much like the eponymous Tower itself. Ligotti’s puppet-narrator (“I,” never given a name) acts almost as a tour guide to this structure, and the syntax of this so-called fiction is presented in statements, averred in factual descriptions, as if we are standing before the Red Tower as it builds itself in our imagination. Abruptly, however, somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph, the narrator switches to a dreamier tone, which casts the story in a shadow of doubt. In fact, most of what the narrator “knows” about the Red Tower is gathered from hearsay, from rumor, from “the delirious and dying words of several witnesses” who are “ostensibly mad” or have “credulous origins.”
To discuss the story, though, first one must examine a brief blueprint. Ligotti’s narrator tells us that the Red Tower is a peculiar thing, surrounded on all sides by a featureless gray landscape, one of “desolate purity.” It is said to rise three stories high (the word “floor” and “level” are both used to describe the different tiers of the Tower—it is worth noting that both verb forms of ‘floor’ and ‘level’ denote bringing something low) and yet is completely closed off to any ground-level entry or exit. There are windows, but none below the second story, and all of them are smashed. These three above-ground stories are completely vacant, inhabited only by the ghostly outlines where machines of industry once took up space—I imagined this quite like the blasted shadows of Hiroshima, post-devastation. The Tower, it is said, has been subject to various “fadings” over the years, which are described as lost skirmishes in the war between the Red and the Gray. Indeed, Ligotti’s narrator ‘envisions’ that the Tower was not always Red, that it formed out of the Gray, that it, too, was once indistinguishable from the neutrality surrounding it.
And the word that the narrator uses to describe this process is a strange one: it is an encrimsoning.
I’ve mentioned admiring Ligotti’s clever use of colors in his fiction prior to this story, and nowhere is it more apparent than in this entry—the ‘red’ of the tower is seemingly at odds with the ‘grayish halo of desolation’ that surrounds it, and it is this conflict that Ligotti returns to again and again.
I’ll note a few interesting things that occurred to me as I read through this. Red is, obviously, the color of blood, the color of fire, the color of passion. At both sunrise and sunset, the heavens can be streaked with this color—interestingly, this is due to a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. The reason for this red hue is because, at these times, the path of the sunlight through the atmosphere to our eyes is at its longest. (Rayleigh scattering also explains why we perceive the sky as “blue.”) Red is both attractive to our attention and can be quite toxic—as in the case of vermilion pigment, which was once derived from cinnabar (a form of mercury) mines. Red can be a warning, or it can symbolize power. When one is said to be “in the red,” they are in debt. But, I think, most pertinently, the color red is known to be (per current evidence) the first color that was reproduced and broken down into shades by humans. We see this in cave-paintings still left over from pre-antiquity. This is said to be as a result of our bodies evolving, our retinas developing a new cell with which to perceive this color.
(Perhaps incongruously, “red” is also a homophone of “read,” which I did not note until I finished the story. I had ‘read’ “The Red Tower.”)
But, returning to the Red Tower and its “stories”: beyond the it is not the above-ground that we are concerned with, primarily. Ligotti’s narrator ‘envisions’ that the Red Tower was never an ordinary factory, and here it is that the story diverges into a place of imagination—Ligotti’s narrator seeming to represent a kind of factory themselves, churning out strangeness after strangeness. Our narrator (“I” (eye?)) discusses the three underground levels (as above, so below) at length, after learning of a vague subterranean access point. The first underground level is described as a mine of sorts, and yet Ligotti takes great pains to use grotesquely organic syntax here:
“…an expansive chamber which had been crudely dug out of the rocky earth and was haphazardly perpetuated by a dense structure of supports, a criss-crossing network of posts and pillars, beams and rafters, that included a variety of materials—wood, metal, concrete, bone, and a fine sinewy webbing that was fibrous and quite firm.”
One cannot help but draw parallels to the body with this kind of language, and I was immediately put in mind of a human chest cavity (excavated of all organs, of course), all ribs and sinew and dripping walls. Ligotti then goes on to say that this first underground level extends in all directions with a variety of tunnels beneath the gray landscape above. In fact, the “goods” manufactured by the Red Tower can be delivered, via these tunnels, impossibly, to any destination, anywhere. (Hilariously, this brought to mind the one and only e-retail giant, Amazon, for me.) The structuring of this honeycomb of tunnels also made me think of another analogue: less tunnels, and more roots—or, as the philosophers Deleuze & Guattari might say, the rhizome.
(As an aside: D&G’s concept of the rhizome (“mass of roots”) argues that history and culture are less chronological developments and more maps of attraction and influence with no specific beginning or origin. They even say that a rhizome “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo,” which, to my mind, describes the stasis of the Red Tower quite neatly as well.)
The original productions of the Red Tower are described as largely formless, though our narrator’s I describes them of a certain “novelty.” (Note the word ‘novel’ there, which can point to something being ‘new’ but also refers to a certain type of fiction.) These amorphous, lumpy creations seem to exhibit a kind of straining toward life, toward sentience, indeed, even individuality. Though perhaps it is only the narrator who is imbuing them with these qualia, via a sort of pareidolia (faces, eyes, reaching, grasping)—a kind of evolution is beginning.
The Tower, however, or whatever unseen forces lie behind its operation (if any!), are not content with this first salvo of “goods.” Throughout the next section, the ‘goods’ continue to evolve, in a variety of seemingly chaotic and random stages, until there is suddenly described a need to expand further. Then the narrator takes us down the elevator to the second subterranean level, which is described as “smaller,” and “much more intimate,” containing what appears to be a crude replica of a graveyard, complete with headstones. Curiously, though, these headstones are not marked with either names or dates of birth/death—they are blank, and the walls surrounding have a strange phosphorescence. These, our narrator explains, are the result of the Red Tower moving from ‘novelty items’ to ‘hyper-organisms,’ displaying “the most essential qualities of their organic nature.” This so-called graveyard is not for the purpose of burying, explains the narrator—these are “birthing graves.”
This appears to be the impetus for the war between the Red and the Gray to finally reach its (supposed) climax, through a series of decimations and evaporations, and explains why the Red Tower is in such a state of advanced ruin. However, Ligotti is not content to conclude there. He returns to the blueprint, and the aforementioned third subterranean level. Through a combination of more rumors and hearsay, it is noted that this third level continues to churn, industriously, even more perfectly deranged and degenerate creations. The war, it seems, will continue—perhaps will always continue.
Rather than “The Red Tower” conforming to Ligotti’s particular love of parable, this story instead functions as high allegory, to my mind. Amazingly, it is built on foundations of shifting sand: nearly everything related to the reader—via a veritable paragon of the unreliable narrator—is told second, or perhaps even third-hand, muddied even further by the derangements of illnesses both mental or physical. The narrator themselves, in the final paragraph, even mentions:
“But as I have noted throughout this document, I am only repeating what I have heard. I myself have never seen the Red Tower—no one ever has, and possibly no one ever will.”
Suddenly, we are standing not in front of the ruins of Ozymandias’ statue (o vast and trunkless legs of stone!) but in front of the ‘traveler from an antique land,’ whose gibbering insanities have corrupted our imagination entirely, forcing us to become a factory of our own grotesqueries. (interestingly: Shelley’s poem is also based on a fragment of a rumor, a story told from one to another, much like this story.) One might say the narrator has encrimsoned us with the red passion of their madness. To this point, in the final paragraph alone, the phrase “the Red Tower” is used ten times, repeated in a cadence that sounds almost reverent, liturgical, incantatory. One can almost envision the narrator rocking back and forth in place, wide eyes glued on that barren, featureless landscape—waiting for the Red Tower to be birthed from the purity of its desolate womb.
And so, with the quintet of DERANGEMENTS still lingering like a cluttered echo in our brains, we move on to the second act of Teatro Grottesco: DEFORMATIONS. This act is performed in three scenes, though, to my mind, it’s really more a duo than a triad. The stories here are “My Case for Retributive Action,” “Our Temporary Supervisor,” and “In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land.” The first two focus more on a kind of corporate horror, in an interesting and seamless segue from “The Red Tower”—whereas “The Red Tower” is concerned more with the environs of industry, “My Case for Retributive Action” showcases interpersonal dynamics in a noir-styled tone that, sadly, didn’t do very much for me. I enjoyed the ride—as I would any noir—as the narrator navigated the absurd and surreal landscape of the Quine Organization. Notably, the word ‘quine’ is a computing term for a program which “takes no input and produces its source code as its only output,” i.e., a self-replicating program. (The term was coined by D. Hofstadter, in his seminal book Gödel, Escher & Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.) Whether or not this naming convention was intentional on Ligotti’s part is unclear, but I think there are some thematic parallels being drawn between our narrator and his predecessor, Hatcher, whom the narrator has been hired to replace.
The workflow, as described by our narrator’s guide to the company, Ribello, is utterly maddening, and reminds me of dreams I have where I am waiting tables again. Patrons continue to come in, are seated, and somehow I have no awareness of the length of time they’ve been waiting to be served, nor do I recognize any of them. Panic sets in as I realize I have yet to check in with any of them, and they become getting more and more impatient as the temporal flow of the dream dilates and contracts unceasingly, uncaringly, even cruelly. This same feeling came over me like a fog as I continued to read this story, especially where and when Ribello tried to explain the ludicrous policies of the Quine Organization, beginning with the irregular—oops, I mean indefinite—working-hours.
In this story, Ligotti mentions that the town in question is near to “the border,” which won’t be the last time this mysterious line of demarcation will be invoked. Indeed, all three of the stories in DEFORMATIONS deal with a “border,” and what lies on the other side. The liminality inherent in such a term brings to mind a host of associations for me, not the least of which are the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, whose buildings all seem to be pulled inexorably toward a vanishing point on the distant horizon, their shadows skewing as if cast at a late hour by the sundial’s gnomon. These distorted, uneasy landscapes of deserted plazas and out-of-scale objects are forefront in my mind when I envision Ligotti’s “border town,” as if the border is—instead of a city limit, or even a national limit—an event horizon, spaghettifying anything that comes close, even reason and sense.
Oddly enough, by story’s end, “My Case for Retributive Action” transmogrifies into a creature-feature, as the narrator slowly discovers the fate of his predecessor. This abrupt turn felt disingenuous to me, a bit too pat—seeming to descend from the giddy, surreal high of what followed to a lesser climax, one of an easier—even if still quite grotesque—nature. It’s also worth noting that, once again, Ligotti’s trademark disdain for anything iatrogenic makes a recurrence here: our narrator, it seems, has been sent to the Quine Organization in an attempt to cure his ‘nervous condition,’ as had Hatcher, his predecessor. This doctor, who is never named (though described as the only doctor in the ‘two-street town’) states that “nothing is unendurable,” and that this position will help the protagonist to realize this fundamental truth. When the story eventually concludes, the doctor is once again invoked, but this time, the axiomatic phrase is repeated with a heavy dose of a different kind of medicine—irony.
Following quickly on the heels of this corporate noir is another tale centering the Quine Organization: “Our Temporary Supervisor.” Whereas “My Case for Retributive Action” didn’t necessarily land for me, this story absolutely did. It is possible that this story could even be said to be set within the Red Tower—at least, metaphorically, to my mind, as the structure of this factory is described differently (a “nondescript, one-story structure made entirely of cinder blocks and cement.”) within the text of this story. I could also see overlap between this story and “The Town Manager,” as they both concern the departure of one authority figure (for an irregular—oops, I mean, indefinite—amount of time) and the subsequent usurpation of that position by a malevolent force bent on deranging (and deforming?) the status quo.
There’s a lot of seeming synecdoche going on this story: a larger theme of “parts to the whole,” especially when the actual ‘business’ of the factory is left vague, at best. The day-to-day work consists of assembly of “pieces of metal into other pieces of metal . . . delivered to us from another factory.” There’s also a lot of mention of things that are meant to be finite, temporally speaking—things which ought to be or are expected to be temporary. The narrator, when we first meet them, explains that this particular posting was never meant to last for very long. The word ‘temporary’ is not used here, though—instead, a negation of ‘forever’ is how Ligotti chooses to describe the narrator’s expectations of their job: “I did not imagine myself standing forever at my designated assembly block…”
Ligotti returns to his continual theme as this story continues—that of the doomed querent: pursuing knowledge will only lead to punishment, or perhaps madness. For our narrator, standing at their station like a rock in a turgid river, the weirdness occurs around them rather than to them, directly. Much of the story concerns the irregularity of the working-hours, just like the story it immediately follows, and how nightmarish a job can become when taken to a surreal extreme. The new ‘temporary supervisor’ exists unseen, but certainly felt—and when those co-workers start to question the bizarre demands of this authority, they are swiftly replaced by new hires, all of which seem supernally anent their tasks: they move at a furious pace, spurring the narrator to do the same. Even when the ‘temporary’ reign of this new supervisor ends and the old authority returns, he is marked as a ‘changed man.’ The mysterious, perhaps diabolical, plans of the larger Quine Organization, continue to be shrouded in mystery.
Perhaps this story rings true for me because I currently labor in a day job myself, in a customer service-facing retail position, and there are days when it feels utterly surreal to be working as a small piece in a larger machine. It, too, should ostensibly be ‘temporary,’ and yet as the days (and years) stretch on, a gray despair sets in that there will not be anything on the other side. Some days, I can think of nothing more hellish than to be consigned to a broken system managed by faceless folks that I never see, endeavoring to ‘do a good job’ for the sake of ‘making a living.’ Ligotti captures this feeling of despair fluidly and with aplomb. I shudder to think of ‘temporary’ becoming ‘forever,’ but it can be difficult to see the end of the road when there is nothing but asphalt, spreading in all directions—and what happens when that asphalt begins to crack and sunder, revealing the howling void beneath?
And thus we come to “In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land,” which is broken into titled segments, and which finally delves more into the mysterious nature of this ‘border’ that has been hinted at in the past few entries. I admit that, while reading this story, I found myself wondering if most casual readers don’t jive with Ligotti’s work due to the fact that there isn’t really an emphasis on character development. Most of what occurs in this lengthy tale happens around the protagonist, rather than to them, and I think this also might be true for most of Ligotti’s stories at large. In the first of the titled sections, “His Shadow Shall Rise to a Higher House,” we learn of the peculiar Ascrobius, whose wish was to be uncreated, to have his entire existence annulled. We learn (again, through rumor and hearsay—here referred to as ‘twilight talk’) that there is a graveyard in this border town, and that it contains a ‘missing grave.’ I was instantly brought back to the Red Tower, and its secondary subterranean level, with its ‘birthing graves,’ at this mention, and the feeling only intensified as this story wound on.
The hauntological and the liminal are deftly interwoven here, and the narrator’s casual investigations of the town deepen and darken as we continue to meet various personages who—especially due to their Beckett-esque naming conventions (Glimm, Pyk, Crumm)—almost feel like caricatures. The story continues in a second section, titled “The Bells Will Sound Forever,” and once again there is a feeling of doom, of being stuck in a between-place, the same theme which rang out so shrilly through most of “Our Temporary Supervisor,” with its disquisitions on “Not forever—just for now!” I was also put in mind of Tennessee Williams’ beautiful, sprawling stage play Camino Real, in which a host of ‘fictional’ characters are stuck in a dystopian community, ruled over from on high by an autocrat—the difference here being, of course, that there is no singular force of authority in Ligotti’s ‘border town,’ there is only the border itself, and whatever void lies beyond it.
In the last two sections, entitled “A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing” and “When You Hear the Singing, You Will Know It Is Time” (these titles begin to sound like the multi-clausal naming conventions of certain post-rock bands/albums which I used to listen to back in the early 2000s), our narrator begins to despair of ever leaving this northern border-town. They remark upon the “occult passing of time” and learn that there was once an other town that existed upon the same spot as the current one, until one day it disappeared. This other town is decried as a demon town by a passive bystander, who informs us that it was made invisible by demonic entities whose main sport was to throw out ‘thresholds’ as lures to the unwary.
I think I could probably spend an entire separate post of reaction and analysis to this lengthy story, which not only circles back to Ligotti’s customary themes of clowns, odd townships populated by even odder citizens, occult signifiers, etc., but deepens them and even attempts to create a larger mythos via their telling. This particular entry, to me, felt slightly disconnected, almost fragmentary, despite the repeated occurrences of characters within the sections, almost like episodes of a television show. Our only through-line—our Main Street, if you will—to traverse this “Foreign Town” is the narrator’s own perspective, and even this, by story’s end, appears to become corrupted by the extent of their exposure to this place. Again, the repeated emphasis on temporality makes me think that these shreds of people are all orbiting a gulping, gasping black hole, and that with every revolution around its pulsing void, they draw inexorably nearer and nearer to its maw. By story’s end, we learn that the narrator walks away from this place, and, years later, discovers the town has been ‘cleaned up’ of its ‘contaminated elements.’ Any ‘threat’ has also been dismissed by these unnamed investigators (one assumes the Quine Organization sent them?)—as if, with the narrator’s departure, the singularity has swallowed itself, leaving only cosmic detritus where once a hole had been punched in the fabric of the universe.
The third and final grouping of this collection, THE DAMAGED AND THE DISEASED, returns to a five-story set, much like DERANGEMENTS, and it opens with the title story, “Teatro Grottesco.” This was a highlight for me in the collection, concerning the activities of a mysterious ‘cruel troupe,’ whose demented aim is resolutely ‘anti-art.’ It is framed, much like the prior few stories, in a concealing and distorting mist of secondhand rumor and hearsay, but told to the reader from Ligotti’s customary first-person narrator. Curiously, after the initial conceit of the ‘Teatro’ is introduced, Ligotti’s narrator swerves to nest in a fragment of story that feels like it’s written in a third-person perspective: the activities of Spence, a photographer that is seeking revenge against a usurious landlord, and who invokes the mysterious Teatro despite the warnings that come attached. Following the (ir)resolution of this tale, our narrator decides to contact the troupe himself. The motivations for this seem a bit unclear to me, even though Ligotti does a bit of transposition from his own life into his main character here, describing him as “a writer of nihilistic prose works.” Perhaps it is that the destrudo, or the ‘death-urge,’ is unfathomable to me (despite a steady acquaintance with depression and its cousins) — I cannot imagine wishing to put an end to my creative/artistic outlet, even if it does cause me some angst from time to time.
The narrator’s plan to draw the attention of the Teatro is apparently successful, from an outside eye, though within the world of the story, a complication ensues: the narrator is brought low by an intestinal virus (emphasis Ligotti’s), which hospitalizes him, and triggers the next stage of the story. (From what I understand, Ligotti has often endured a similar physical malady himself.)
Before I continue, there are two interesting things, contextually, that I’d like to draw attention to, vis-a-vis naming conventions in this story.
The first is Ligotti’s choice of nomenclature when it comes to location where the ‘artistic underground’ meets: the “Des Esseintes library.” Des Esseintes is also the name of the neurasthenic protagonist from the classic French novel À Rebours (Against the Grain) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Á Rebours spends most of its length commenting on the excessive hedonism of fin-de-siècle French society—even though des Esseintes removes himself from Paris to a country house in Fontenay (and continuing his exploration of the sensual in an unchecked, ribald manner), this self-imposed exile only serves to deepen his condition, and eventually the story concludes with his return to Paris, uncured and unhealed. (There is even an episode in À Rebours where the protagonist meets with a ventriloquist, another of Ligotti’s favorite narrative elements!)
It is worth noting that Huysman was also extremely pessimistic when it came to humanity. Most of his work is concerned with l’éternelle bêtise de l’humanité, or, “the eternal stupidity of humanity.” This quote actually comes from Huysman’s novel En Menage (Married Life), though, honestly, it could also have shown up in any of Ligotti’s fiction and I would have been none the wiser.
The second piece of note comes just before our protagonist comes in contact with the Teatro (or at least, its representative), as he wanders the decrepit back hallways of the hospital.
“The voice came over the public address system, but it was not a particularly loud voice. In fact, I had to strain my attention for several minutes simply to discern what the peculiar qualities of the voice and to decipher what it said. It sounded like a child’s voice, a sing-song voice full of taunts and mischief. Over and over it repeated the same phrase—paging Dr Groddeck, paging Dr Groddeck. The voice sounded incredibly hollow and distant, garbled by all kinds of interference. Paging Dr Groddeck, it giggled from the other side of the world.”
When I first read this, I assumed that ‘Groddeck’ was Ligotti’s invention, a sly mangling of the word ‘grotesque,’ as if the word was spoken by someone who had a swollen tongue. On further research however, it appears that there actually did exist a Dr. Groddeck1, who published various books relating to psychology and psycho-somatic conditions around the turn of the 20th century. Interestingly, his book “Nasamecu2. Der gesunde und der kranke Mensch” (The Healthy and the Sick Man) posits that the human body becomes either sick or well depending on how it obeys the orders of the human unconscious.
All of this leads me to think that Ligotti was particularly intentional in naming these narrative elements—especially given how the narrator links his diagnosis of an intestinal virus to something more sinister, and especially given the manner in which the story eventually concludes.
There are so many layers to peel back in this story, and it’s no wonder that it does double duty as both short story and collection title. I like to think that the “anti-art” message that is subtly woven into the fiction here spans most of the stories in this collection, almost as if the entire thing is an anthology of ‘plays’ that the ‘cruel troupe’ is mounting before our eyes. This, plus Huysman’s repeated emphasis on attempting to transcend the physical body (replete with its incurable ailments), is very in keeping with Ligotti’s whole modus operandi: the embedding of that which is entropic into a homogenous landscape, like trying to seed a fallow field fertile—only with chaos and disorder.
After this relentlessly bleak episode of self-directed annihilation, Ligotti moves into the second story, “Gas Station Carnivals,” which turns the prism of memory on its head—refracting, instead of a rainbow, a violently splintered gradient of darkness that is no less blinding. In this tale, reminiscent of the loopy, recursive dream-logic most commonly encountered in David Lynch’s films, no one (and no thing) is what they appear, and agency/control over one’s own thoughts or memories is illusive at best, if not an outright fallacy. Most of the action is located in a place called the “Crimson Cabaret,” ruled over by a mysterious personage known only as the “old crimson woman.” (One is put in mind of the blue-haired woman occupying the box seat at Club Silencio in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., wordlessly observing all of the goings-on.) This “crimson woman” is deemed as an authority of sorts by our narrator, who, much like our guide through the previous story, is suffering in their stomach even as they patronize this establishment.
Our narrator meets with an acquaintance whose name is given as Quisser—an art critic of sorts, who, it is said, has offended the “crimson woman” at a party a few days before by calling her a “deluded no-talent” (emphasis Ligotti’s). It seems as if this woman has taken the insult to heart, as a number of changes have occurred in the cabaret—the paintings on the walls have changed, and the stage itself has undergone alterations: sigils and other such occult symbols have been added to the curtains, bringing to mind similarly-described ideographs used in “In the Shadow of Another World,” (Grimscribe) which were ostensibly used to keep the ‘other world’ at bay. Quisser is there to apologize to the crimson woman, but she is not to be found. However, the waitress that attends to both, said to be “very loyal” to this unseen authority, might stand in as a go-between, remarks Quisser. Before he can attempt this, he makes an abrupt turn into memory, his so-called ‘true reason’ for speaking with our narrator.
Quisser asks our narrator if he can recall a strange phenomenon—the “gas station carnivals” of the title—of which his conversation partner (and our guide through this story) is entirely ignorant. It seems that, back in his childhood, Quisser and his family would take long vacations, traveling by car, and would often happen across these rural, localized instances where a ‘filling station’ (not a ‘service station’) would come attached with a ‘carnival’—or at least the ‘bare bones’ of a carnival—with a variety of sideshows. as well as a ‘special tent’ with other acts. Here is the first overlap with another entry in the collection: Quisser specifically mentions the “Human Spider,” which brings to mind Hatcher’s unendurable fate in “My Case for Retributive Action.” He goes on to describe other specific horrors, including one called the “Showman,” who always stood with his back to the audience and yet seemed perpetually about to turn around, “…threatening to reveal one side of his face of the other, playing a horrible game of peek-a-boo.”
It is at this juncture that our narrator interjects, claiming that he understands what is happening: Quisser’s memories have been hijacked by the “crimson woman” in an elaborate revenge. She is wielding a kind of ‘art-magic,’ explains the narrator, and she has seeded Quisser with this false recollection, causing him an inordinate amount of terror when he brings these ‘carnivals’ and their exhibits to the forefront of his mind. Quisser rebuts this with a number of defenses, all of which are torn down by the narrator. Eventually, Quisser—who is shaken to his core—gets up from the table to go use the restroom, and our narrator spends some words pontificating on the ‘inherent chaos of things’ before Quisser seems to return. But it is not Quisser—it is the waitress, who is offering our sour-stomached narrator yet another cup of mint tea. When he declines, instead remarking that Quisser might want another glass of wine, it is revealed to him that there has never been another person at the table that evening—that our narrator has been alone the entire time. Even when our narrator tracks down Quisser the next day, the critic himself confirms that he had not been at the Crimson Cabaret the night prior—that he had actually been indisposed (“—some bug, he said—”).
Our narrator returns to the cabaret and, in our single encounter with the crimson woman of repute, offers his own apology, having become deeply confused over who delivered the inciting insult as well as who was the offended party. The crimson woman, however, is similarly confused, acting as a kind of mirror for the narrator’s own irritability, but remarks ‘that bitch of a waitress’ has taken down all of the crimson woman’s paintings and replaced them all with her own. Thus, every personage in the story—as well as their intentions, or past transgressions—is thrown into doubt, and the entire story is destabilized.
Ligotti uses the concept of ‘art-magic’ here in a similar manner to the preceding “Teatro Grottesco,” showcasing a cabal of largely-unseen powers that have the ability to deform and reshape not only reality, but our conception of the same. It brings to mind a quotation from Aldous Huxley: “Each man's memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.” Unfortunately for those doomed denizens of Ligotti’s skewed universe, said “literature” is not so private—the books of their past are rifled through with great violence, and sometimes entire pages are ripped loose from the binding…
“The Bungalow House” continues to examine the theme of art and its sometimes deranging influence, but expands on this to include the hypnotic nature of obsession. It recalls, to my thinking, the curious fading-away that happens when one stares protractedly at a singular item in the visual field: a miasma of gray filters in like a fog around the edges of one’s vision, eventually obliterating all else but the object of one’s focus. It is this sinister, uncanny feeling that came over me when I read this entry, concerning the (perhaps) deranged quest of a librarian to uncover the identity of a peculiarly affecting artist. The art experienced takes the form of audio-tapes, held as exhibits in a particularly decrepit gallery, in which a “monotonal and distorted” voice recounts dream-monologues describing certain locations. The first of these exhibits introduces the titular “bungalow house,” but those following move into other places, including “The Derelict Factory with a Dirt Floor and Voices” (recalling, of course, our prior entries regarding the Quine Organization as well as “The Red Tower”).
Ligotti seems to be investigating a variant of Stendhal syndrome, which involves an adverse psychosomatic reaction to certain works of art—a kind of ecstasy3 that manifests via corporeal symptoms. Although those affected by Stendhal syndrome seem to be transcending their concept of self due to ineffable beauty or aesthetic, Ligotti’s narrator is thrown into violent psychical discord via the Stgyian bleakness of the unknown artist’s creations. Most interestingly, this intense abjection of self arises due to the narrator’s increasing attachment to the unseen artist, via a perceived kinship which is not revealed until close to the end of the tale. When our narrator finally comes in contact with what is possibly the artist responsible for the tapes, he launches into a monologue detailing his depressive, anhedonic state—a state which seems to have been with him for ‘as long as he can remember.’ To the reader, though, it is unclear whether or not this is true, or if the art has “implanted” itself into the narrator’s consciousness. In fact, Ligotti goes so far as to say that the narrator and the artist might not be disparate identities—a ‘twist’ which, in lesser hands, might have felt unnecessary—but here, Ligotti executes this so deftly that the blurring of personae feels integral to deciphering the code of this story.
As we blur into the penultimate entry, “Severini,” we find a number of repeated themes: not only artists and their creations, but also the possibility of a divided (severed?) self and the presence of occult magics that warp and distort reality to the point where the reader must question their own perception of the narrative. The titular personage is a cult-like figure, revered and legendary, who operates out of a shack in the middle of a marsh4 and maintains the so-called “Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum.” The fact that Ligotti sets the majority of this story in the teeming morass of a swampy biome is integral to the central theme: that of “the nightmare of the organism” (emphasis Ligotti). This is the culmination of the abject physicality brought to bear in the prior stories—the malady is even named, as we trudge further into the tangled marsh: it is, in fact, dysentery—amoebic dysentery, to be specific—that takes center stage here. Although, interestingly, Ligotti uses the Spanish: “disentaría,” as the narrator is within a ‘tropical landscape,’ in a sort of temple. This brings to mind a host of associations: to ‘disinter’ something is to exhume it, to dig it up. As the division between our narrator and Severini blurs and finally, seems to collapse (they are billeted as ‘sympathetic organisms’), it seems as though Ligotti might be playing with the concept of a psychogenic fugue state (as seen in a possible interpretation of David Lynch’s film Lost Highway), the narrator is ‘unburying’ his ‘severed self’ by becoming more aware of their similarities.
Surprisingly, Ligotti seems to address this implication directly in the text, which is unlike him, to my mind. I almost find myself questioning this, due to the fact that Ligotti is often so elliptical and elusive regarding his core themes, but it seems to be pretty plainly revealed in the following passage:
“It was almost as if I could understand the things they chanted in voices of tortured solemnity. Deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know. There are two faces which must never confront each other. There is only one body which must struggle to contain them both.”
This not only confirms my suspicions of psychogenic fugue/dissociation, but also hints at a familiar paradox-cum-trope in time-travel fiction: if one were to come in contact with one’s past self, the stability of the universe (and reality itself!) might be threatened and become unstable. Interestingly, “Severini” is how distinctly apposite the two characters are positioned: they never do come into contact with one another, seeming to repel one another, in the manner of like-poled magnets. In a striking turn of convention, Ligotti swerves from the traditional first-person narrative mid-story to the second-person, utilizing what feels like a system of direct address (minus the “I”) to illustrate the schism in the narrator’s psyche. The story is horrifyingly organic, perhaps moreso than any other of Ligotti’s work, and the words almost appear to teem on the page itself as they illustrate the “nightmare of the organism.”
And finally, we come to the last story: “The Shadow, the Darkness,” which serves as a kind of cross-roads (pun intended, especially in the context of a specific Messiah) for all of Ligotti’s work to this point. Frustratingly, it was one of my least favorite entries in this collection. It is a particularly lengthy discourse involving many meta-fictional entities, including Ligotti’s own philosophical treatise, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It also seems to zero in on a point that Ligotti has hammered home time and time again: his position that self-awareness in humanity is the origin point of all our suffering. This is not entirely new: it was posited previously by a similarly pessimistic philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe, and is the crux of his argument in his work The Last Messiah.
This story is a kind of corruption, to my thinking, of the hero’s journey, and we are treated to the confessions of an artist named Reiner Grossvogel, after he suffers from a complication of an ongoing digestive malfunction and is taken to a hospital. The narrator accompanies Grossvogel, and makes a number of observations which seem to be tied to other hospital locales we’ve visited prior (the one described at the close of “Teatro Grottesco” immediately leaps to mind) and whose staff are similarly unnerving. After this episode, however, Grossvogel is given new life (the narrator describes him as physically the same, but something is different) and, after a lengthy monologue that functions as a kind of inverted gospel, Grossvogel reveals his latest sculpture:
TSALAL NO. I
The odd word “tsalal,” it is told, originates from the Hebrew, meaning “to become darkened” or “enshadowed,” (as opposed to encrimsoned, perhaps, if we remember, from “The Red Tower”?) and it is this shadow, this darkness, which is actually in control of our physical bodies, and which fills us like the hand of a puppeteer might fill its puppet. It is exactly the kind of symbiotic relationship one might imagine in such a relationship: this “tsalal” is parasitic, and not only fills Grossvogel, but also “activates” him.
The story then changes tack: our narrator is abruptly speaking to an unnamed man (after a series of diversions involving a “rest room” in a coffee shop (which Quisser “entered/exited” back in “Gas Station Carnivals”), and this man is the force behind clarifying most of the obscurities of Grossvogel’s gospel. It is also possible that this “man” is Ligotti himself, as mention is made of his book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.
After a series of convoluted, yet dryly Socratic, conversation surrounding the artist’s “metamorphic recovery” and the “metaphysical-physical excursion” that those gathered to witness have embarked upon, said abdominal malady begins to afflict not just our narrator, but the others present, who have heard the gospel of Grossvogel. It seems that, via the communicability of self-awareness, each of the witness have become infected—their bodies are in revolt, now in possession of the awareness that they are only puppets for whatever shadowy hand is wriggling inside of their bodies—and that wriggling is intensifying, even deepening…
I think what I like the most about Teatro Grottesco, on a whole, is how elegantly and deeply intertwined all of the entries are—even those that I didn’t enjoy as much—almost to a fault. The book itself seems to hint (especially with its final story) at a deeper, lurking mythos or lore, one which Ligotti seems to be returning to again and again as his philosophy surrounding the abject and the inhuman coalesces. Most of this nightmare is referred to elliptically, via metaphors like clowns and puppets and sideshows, but as the collection closes, it seems that Ligotti is shucking off the metaphor and choosing to angle more directly for the abjection of the physical body and its various weakness. Ligotti chooses to think that humanity is somehow underdeveloped to be able to combat any other force, especially that of darkness and terror, and yet he continually writes of this feeling with such vigor and passion that it is almost difficult to comprehend the dissonance. As the unnamed writer in “The Shadow, the Darkness” mentions toward the end of the story:
“Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race that my treatise might have illuminated . . . They are the ultimate means for the cover-up, the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness — its ultimate artistic cover-up.”
This puts me in mind of a similar quotation, from Samuel Beckett: “Words are an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.5”
Surprisingly, despite being possessed by a kind of optimism throughout most of my days, I can’t disagree with Ligotti’s estimation of humanity (or society, by extension) at large, and it’s this frustration I carry with me when I read his work. I don’t want to think that perhaps that original sin, eating the proverbial fruit of the tree of knowledge6—is the source of our perpetual suffering; I don’t want to believe that joy is only a mask that we don to hide a rictus of madness.
But Ligotti is cruel, not just to himself, but also to those which choose to read him—another punishment for being self-aware is realizing that you’re being punished, and continuing to seek more of the same.
Well, call me a glutton, then. Perhaps the hand that puppets me is less shadow than light. That’s all I can hope for, I guess. Unless that hope, too, is just a projection on the walls of a cave.
At least the fire’s warm, and the shadows are dancing.
Though Ligotti’s Groddeck is later revealed to be a Theodore, the real-life Groddeck’s praenomen was Georg.
This is an acronym of Groddeck’s own, formed from a Latin sententia: natura sanat, medius curat, which means “nature heals, the physician cures.”
From the Greek ekstasis, or ‘standing outside of oneself,’ the etymology of which I find particularly appropriate for this story.
Ligotti names the marsh after St. Alban, a reference to one of Britain’s first martyrs, beheaded for offering sanctuary to a persecuted Christian. However, on the way to his execution, a number of miracles occurred, including the drying-up of water and also a springing-up of the same.
And yet, reader, he said it.
Consider, too—if the metaphor of this ‘original sin’ is to be extended—that Ligotti’s repeated use of intestinal upset as narrative element may very well be caused by the body’s attempt—and failure—to digest said fruit.